>Middle-Earth: Shadow of War
I like the Batman: Arkham games, and I love Lord of the Rings, but this mix kind of misses the appeal of both. Still, I enjoyed the first game enough to play the sequel. The combat completely loses the sense of rhythm that makes Batman fun, and the world in both games loses all the fantasy that would make it feel like you're actually playing in Middle-Earth.
Not only is the combat shitty compared to Batman, but I don't actually like the Nemesis System that they tried to make a big selling point. The orcs never actually feel like actual characters, which is the entire point. It just adds an annoyance if you die and have to go and get revenge if you don't want to miss out on stuff. But then even when you kill them, they often come back, which makes killing them feel pointless. But okay, you're supposed to recruit all of them? But you can't. You can try, but once you do, new unrecruited ones will just spawn, and some of yours will just disappear to make room. This is especially bad with the Warchiefs. Defeat Warchiefs to weaken the fortress? Okay. But wait, no, once you defeat a few, new ones will just spawn in. Sometimes I defeated three, then when I went to get the fourth, two new ones just spawned in, meaning I was actually punished for doing something that was supposed to give me a reward. Then the second game tries to make this into some online grindfest, but of course I just didn't bother with the online stuff. I hear the endgame was just "defend fortresses like 30 times in order to earn the final cutscene," but they changed it to only having to defend like five times, at the same time they removed lootboxes from the game. An improvement, but it's still boring. Not a terrible idea in theory, but it never ends up being used effectively, and it has a few stupid issues that hinder it significantly.
The second game pissed me off with its world map that shows a bunch of locations that it looks like you'll get to visit, but you don't. You begin in Minas Ithil, which is all well and good, and then you unlock a second city and a world map, and you see Minas Tirith right there. Obviously that's the main location you'd want to visit, since it's actually important to the story of Lord of the Rings, and a very iconic location with a cool layout that seems fun to play in. Nope. It never actually unlocks, even though it has a clickable icon just like the locations that do eventually unlock. Getting to play in locations that look and feel like locations from the films would go a long way, but that never happens. I get that the setting is Mordor, but maybe it shouldn't have been, since that's not actually a location that the story spends a lot of time in in either the books or movies. I'd much rather get to explore Gondor or Khazad Dum or Lothlorien or any number of places that actually are memorable. One single Mordor location would be cool, with Mount Doom and Barad Dur and stuff like that, but oh wait, you don't actually get to go to those locations in playable parts of this game either.
Also, I'm sure Tolkien would spin in his grave if he saw the game. He'd probably say that it was grizzly or ghastly or something. But that said, I do want to play an action game, even if that completely contradicts the ideas of most of his stories. I don't think they had to butcher the character of Celebrimbor to do it, though.
Anyway I still 100%ed both games. It took me something like 42 hours for the second one, which I just beat. I'll still play the DLC where you play as some elf-woman warrior, even though that's incredibly fucking stupid and a blatant political move that misses key points of Tolkien's stories.